UQ's Google Search Appliance

The University of Queensland has licensed the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to provide a university-wide web search solution. The GSA brings the full power of the public Google engine to campus, and will allow UQ to focus and refine the results provided, making them more productive and useful. The GSA replaces the previous Google University search, which has been in use for the last few years.

The UQ community had often noted that Google Search is accurate, reliable and familiar. Building on this, the Marketing and Communications and Information Technology Services worked together to evaluate the UQ community's needs and the existing technologies available, and concluded that the GSA should be incorporated into UQ's infrastructure.

The UQ GSA provides features that the commercial Google search cannot duplicate, such as: Continuous Crawling; Collections Management; Front Ends Customization; Key Matches; Synonyms; and Filtering of the search results. The Google Search Appliance can be authenticated to crawl and index where external search engines cannot, meaning access-restricted documents can also be searched. The primary difference between the two is that the UQ GSA only "crawls" and indexes websites that fall inside the uq.edu.au domain (as well as other UQ related domains).

The main access point for the Google Search Appliance is the search page http://www.uq.edu.au/search. It is also possible to place a 'search box', which links to the Google appliance through a HTML form, on other websites to search those at particular sites or sets of pages. For information about this, see the Web Developers Guide.